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My department, the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) at Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering recently organized our own research symposium with the theme, "Windows to the Mind". The main event was an open lecture by Dr. Margaret Thomas of Boston College. She talked about her research on kuusho (空書), or the habit most Japanese speakers have of writing kanji characters in the air or on one's palm (also observed in Chinese speakers and others). She talked about several experiments she has done to explore the practice and what implications they have for larger issues of language and cognition. It was a fascinating lecture and I would definitely recommend interested people to follow her work on this. It's a topic that is incredibly prevalent in Japan, yet largely ignored (perhaps because it is so prevalent).

Like my previous post, this one is also a little late in getting on-line, but for the record, here it is. In November, I traveled to Okinawa, Japan together with some of my colleagues from the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) in Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering in order to conduct and present in a symposium at the Japan Association for Educational Psychology (JAEP). The title of our symposium was "Important issues concerning the communication skills development of students in higher education". We focused on four somewhat disparate, but not unrelated topics. Emmanuel Manalo, the symposium leader, talked about students' use of diagrams during note-taking in order to comprehend the subject matter better; Chris Sheppard looked at factors influencing the failure rate in university level English courses; Fusa Katada considered how universities in Japan are prepared to deal with students with learning disabilities; and I talked about fluency development based on results from the Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena (pilot). Although the content of my talk was similar to that I presented a few weeks earlier at SLRF in Pittsburgh, I emphasized some results from the corpus which suggests that certain aspects of a learner's first language speech characteristics (especially speech rate), can be used to estimate their second language aptitude.

This message is a little late in getting on-line, but for the record, at least, I'll still upload it. In October I was very busy as I made two conference trips in succession. First, I traveled to Hamamatsu here in Japan where I presented at the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) International Conference. After returning back home to Tokyo for one day, I then traveled to Pittsburgh to Carnegie-Mellon University where I participated in the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF).

I made a similar presentation at both conferences, though I emphasized the pedagocial implications at the JALT conference. In particular, I noted how results based on the Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena (pilot version) show that Nation's (1989) 4/3/2 fluency exercise technique can be connected to an increase in perceived fluency.

The Filled Pause Research Center is please to announce the initial release of Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena (CCHP) materials. This release includes audio files (wav and mp3) and transcripts (annotated xml and plain text) for six participants. The transcription process is still ongoing. Thus, transcripts in this release do not yet contain time markings and there are no Praat TextGrid files yet.

Those who wish to access the corpus are asked to create a new account in the FPRC. After doing so, the corpus archive can be accessed on the CCHP main page. Registered users may then download the entire corpus (as released so far) or sub-collections of the corpus or browse and download individual files in the corpus.